IWG EDUCATION GROUP MEETING
Discussion of part IX of the Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation pamphlet.
When: Monday, 25 September 2023, at 7:00pm (EST)
Where: Zoom (request an invite by contacting us through our social media: linktr.ee)
Internationalist Workers’ Group
Comments
These theses are very clearly written, not too long, and easy to read if you put your mind to it. They are thus helpful in clarifying matters, though I felt a tiny bit queasy in the sections on the Unions, but then the Unions are enough to make anyone sick!
But these lines caught my attention.
I wondered about 'inevitable'. And also about 'reflection'. Isn't communist consciousness a 'product' by the class of a consideration of its non-stop exploitation and enslavement? And of how its struggles for more wages never solve the underpinning political issue of class rule? I don't see much that is inevitable about any of this and 'reflection' sounds too passive.
But: to continue with 'communist consciousness'.
But if there was no struggle then the revolutionary minority of the class would have nothing to reflect on, nothing to consider and to draw the lessons from. The Paris Commune is a case in point. The conclusions of Marx and others on what happened in the Commune arose directly from it. And could not have been reached without it. Similarly, wasn't it the struggle of the Silesian weavers that first triggered serious down-to-earth ideas about communism and the proletariat; leading Marx and others to start thinking about the class and its historic role and even a Communist Manifesto?
Really I think these important lines in your theses could have benefitted from more elaboration. After all communist consciousness and the party are the two most vital issues facing all workers and humanity today.
I hope you don't mind my making these observations on your excellent theses?
Charlie
Thanks for your comment. We don't go in much for the "Theses" form of writing and your comments make me understand why. The concern here is the relationship between the daily class struggle and the revolutionary struggle of the working class and the lines about consciousness and political organisation are very schematic (the longer version is in our pamphlet "Class Consciousness and Political Organisation"). As it happens I think the first quote answers the point you are making about the second quote. You are right (and putting the two quotes up together shows it) that we use "reflection" to mean "product" in the first quote and the second use of reflection is about actually analysing what is going on in the movement - something which does not get done at the time or by the participants but comes afterwards and then enters the revolutionary discussion (and programme) for the next round of the contest. It was not the Communards who drew the lesson about the fact that that the proletariat cannot lay hold of "the ready-made state machinery" but have to smash it but if it had not been for the Commune Marx would not have ditched the reformist and state capitalist measures that were originally put forward at the end of the Communist Manifesto some 23 years earlier. This dialectical interaction can work the other way round too. When the first Soviet was formed in 1905 it was not a theoretical product but the result of a "practical movement" (Marx) from a practical need to unite all the strikes (which were already "political") in Petrograd at the time. At first the Mensheviks were more enthusiastic about them than the Bolsheviks. The latter at first thought the Soviet would take the struggle back to the economic level. It was only as the work of the Soviet in coordinating workers resistance became clearer that it was seen as a new historically-discovered form which immediately posed the question of a new social order and a new way to solve the problem of running a mass society (and without a state). And when in 1917 a new revolutionary situation (on both a Russian and an international scale) appeared it is not surprising that the political parties all worked for its re-establishment as a focus of workers' power. Of course that was not enough as the first Soviet Congress was dominated by SRs and Mensheviks who insisted on class collaboration with the bourgeoisie to continue the war. It required the creation during the course of 1917 of a revolutionary political organisation which reflected (that word again!) the real aims of the working class before the revolution moved on to its proletarian stage. The Bolsheviks opposition to the war from August 1914 and their refusal to accept a compromise with any bourgeois forces made them the vehicle which the proletariat forged as an instrument of their own emancipation (whatever the subsequent course of history and the disaster which awaited the entire proletariat down the line). In short there is a constant process of interaction between the highpoints of the "practical movement" (which is not about the daily economic struggle per se although without the latter the class would disappear) and the revolutionary programme which is a reflection (done it again!) on those high points.
On the Silesian weavers this was Marx's first grasp of the "practical movement"as he moved from Hegelian idealism to a historical materialist understanding (when working on the NRZ) but you can alos add to that the impact of Engels' "Condition of the Working Class ..." and his contact in Paris with those who had more experience of the workers' movement. Without Marx it would have taken longer for the articulation of a modern communist programme but as the examples above show there was plenty Marx still had to learn from the real movement. But the constant antithesis between capital and labour made the emergence of a proletarian consciousness of the possibility of a better world "inevitable". Even in the darkest and most passive moments in the history of class struggle (now?) there have always been nuclei of communists produced by the continuing (and worsening) contradictions of capitalism. The working class may be battered, disorganised and restructured along the lines capital dictates but it never goes away, and neither are we ...
Thank you Cleishbottom for your thorough going and detailed reply to my post, and taking the trouble to do it.
... GOING AWAY! Just realised the grammar did not quite fit! Thanks Charlie.
On facebook, Jeremy Corbyn;True socialism (sadly we make history in circumstances we don't necessarily choose...) Stephen Sutton Sutton We need some real class struggle. Marching from a to B is not cutting it. We need strikes. Hit them where it hurts, at the point of production. Not 1 or 2 day affairs where the unions don't have to pay strike money, where everyone knows they are going back to work. We need indefinite strikes. We need to escalate to other sectors, getting as many out at once as we can. We need to take over our own struggle. We need to break through sectionalism and isolation. No repeats of the miners strike.
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